DirectQ Goes Faster

You could be forgiven for thinking it, but I'm not making this up.

DirectQ just got a fairly significant speed boost in big maps/big scenes; something in the order of up to 50%. This came about from the new surface refresh code I mentioned before, which is now maturing nicely.

As with all other such boosts, this one is only noticeable when things get under stress. If you're the kind of person who only ever plays "Jesus Christ DM3 yesterday, today, tomorrow and FOREVERRRRRRRR" you are not likely to get any gain. Likewise benchmarking with ID1 timedemos won't show an appreciable difference. Run something like Warpspasm, ne_tower or Marcher in it and things really pick up.

I'm not certain how much of this would be translatable to RMQ; differences between how D3D and OpenGL handle draw calls and vertex buffers make it maybe 50/50 in my estimation as to whether it would have any effect at all. Performance-wise D3D clearly has the advantage and really pulls ahead once you get things well structured.

I'm thinking I'll port it anyway as it seems the right thing to do, but I remain wary as previous such porting efforts have in the past resulted in little or no gains (and occasionally even drops) in performance.